"Hollywood is bizarre."

The Gist

Katherine Heigl faced a near constant pressure to lose weight while working in Hollywood.
The 27 Dresses actress called the focus on her weight "bizarre."
She is raising her daughters to think of exercise as being about "feeling emotionally good."

Katherine Heigl is opening up about the realities of spending her career in front of the camera, first as a teen model in the '90s and later as a star on Grey's Anatomy. Speaking in an exclusive interview with People, the veteran actress revealed that she has "been told to lose weight" since she was 16.

"I look at my 16-year-old self and I'm like...'That was your peak. What were they complaining about?'" She recalled. "It's bizarre. Hollywood is bizarre."

The constant emphasis on losing weight made for a negative relationship with exercise, Heigl remembers. "I hated working out," she told People. "I've always associated it with hating my body and wanting my body to change and look different."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 27 Dresses actress wants to do things a little differently with her two daughters, Naleigh and Adalaide. Heigl is raising them and her son, Joshua, with her husband Josh Kelley. The couple met in 2005 and married in 2007 at Stein Eriksen Lodge in Utah.

"I'm trying to explain that to my girls now, like, 'Don't make this about changing your body or fighting with your body,'" she said. "'Make it about feeling emotionally good.'"

Heigl continued, "It's been easy to let other people's opinions and ideas about who I am or how I should be influence my own feelings about myself. I've tried to be overly perfect my whole life and failed again and again because nobody is perfect."

Heigl and Kelley adopted Naleigh and Adalaide from South Korea and Louisiana, respectively. The Knocked Up actress then gave birth to the couple's son, Joshua, in 2016. Heigl later said that adoption was always her priority. "Josh and I started talking about [adoption] before we were even engaged," she told People.

"My sister Meg is Korean, and my parents adopted her three years before I was born. I wanted my own family to resemble the one I came from, so I always knew I wanted to adopt from Korea," Heigl explained following Naleigh's arrival in 2009. "We have talked about having biological children as well, but we decided to adopt first. I just wanted to be a mom. So however we do that, it's fine with me."